9 Ways to Give Effective Employee Feedback

1. Pay It Forward

Very simply, do a good deed for a colleague or employee and ask them to do the same for someone else in turn.It isn’t always easy to take and certainly not easy to give, but if it’s done thoughtfully, usefully and with the best of intentions it will help improve the quality of that person’s work and may even boost their productivity.

2. Be Very Specific

Employee feedback should be task-focused, crystal clear, and to the point.General comments like “Your work needs to be improved” or “I wasn’t very impressed with those reports: you have to do better than that”  will leave your employee confused and in the dark as to what aspect of their work needs to be corrected.

3.  Don’t Wait for a Quarterly Review

Nip issues in the bud as they occur. If left unsaid, the problems will only recur and may multiply by a domino effect, so that by the time the quarterly performance review comes around, you’ll be faced with having to address a host of issues that could have been avoided if mentioned earlier.

4. Make it one-on-one

Don’t criticize publicly – ever.

Even praise for some people is better delivered in a private meeting, rather than being pointed out in a public arena: some people simply don’t like being the center of attention. And allow the opportunity of feedback without a face-to-face meeting as it can make it easier for a person to say what they really think.

5. End on a Positive Note

Helping someone to improve should always be the goal of constructive criticism and going back over past mistakes in your closing comments will leave them with a negative impression of the meeting.

When something needs fixed, mention it at the beginning of your conversation (and read this before you say anything) but by leaving the problem to the end, any words of encouragement you’ve given during the meeting will be forgotten.

6. Use the 3×3 Method

Consider asking your managers to provide three strengths and three areas of potential development in all feedback meetings. This is a method proposed by Bert Decker in his book “You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard”.Keeping your ideas on improvement and strengths succinct (and limiting their number) means that it’s more likely your employee will remember them all. They will likely see your comments as a challenge to improve rather than an effort by you to flatten their ego.

7. Focus on Performance, Not Personality

Focus on employees’ behaviors (what they do) rather than on their personality traits (what they’re like). Here’s an example from The Secret to Giving Constructive Criticism:

“When you interrupt me in front of a client it causes a problem” (behavior)

will probably be easier for the person receiving the criticism than…

“Your arrogance is causing a problem” (Characteristic/Personality trait)…

…simply because the first is appealing to the person’s head rather than their heart.

8. Focus on Individual Efforts

“Part of the problem with reviews is that human nature hasn’t changed – few of us enjoy hearing about our shortcomings, and few of our bosses and colleagues look forward to describing them. Part of the problem is that work itself has changed – it’s more team- oriented, less individualistic. The tougher it is to measure individual performance, the tougher it is to evaluate it.”, says Gina Imperato in Fast Company.

9. Employee Feedback Goes Both Ways

This follows on from point #8.Evaluation is tough and it takes a lot of thought and care to do it properly. Therefore, make sure you give your employee the opportunity to speak up in your meeting or get in touch with you about it afterwards. This way, you’ll get to know whether your effort has worked and whether you need to up your game with the next person!

SOURCE:15five.com